Watching the Rain

I'm sitting at the dining room table on a cold and wet June evening looking out at the grey sky and the rain pouring onto the garden. I love watching the rain and often feel so detached from the elements now that I am working indoors so much of the time.

It has been several weeks now since I looked out one warm evening at the tall lombardy poplar tree just beyond the back of the garden and set myself on a new course for self improvement. It reminded me of the trees my father planted and I have since been back to the farm where I lived as a child and looked back on my childhood to see how it might have affected me as I grew up. With the help of an excellent book on anxiety management I thought I was getting somewhere and saw a significant improvement in some areas, but after a rather traumatic week at work all the good work seems to have been undone. The changes there have been deeply unsettling and I feel I have lost me way, but I know I have to be patient and see what path will open before me.

Building and maintaining strong foundations to life can be easier said than done. I have found psychology and self-awareness incredibly painful at times because everyone views things differently and other people are usually completely unaware or oblivious to the paths that others take. Fundamentalism in belief can alienate. Business pressures in the work place can enhance a feeling of transcience, impersonality and the need to succeed regardless of human costs. Relationships with others can throw up interesting conundrums.

For me, I have been thinking about a model or framework of male archetypes that identifies my strengths and weakness and formulates an understanding that can be healing, progressive, inclusive and natural. I'm exploring that in my own personal writings.

Why bother? Is this all just self-centered navel gazing? Possibly. But there are issues in my life that I know I have to deal with - mainly anxiety (I think). I have a deep need to work through something which I believe is holding me back and it is taking a while to work out exactly what it is. It may be just that I was born to be the way I am, but could there be something else to it...?

I could go and see a psychologist but that is expensive!